This invention relates generally to navigation systems and apparatus and more particularly to integrated radio-inertial navigation systems and apparatus.
The National Aeronautical Association has described the Global Positioning System as "the most significant development for safe and efficient navigation and surveillance of air and spacecraft since the introduction of radio navigation 50 years ago." The Global Positioning System (GPS) consists of 24 globally-dispersed satellites with synchronized atomic clocks that transmit radio signals. Time, as measured by each satellite, is embedded in the transmitted radio signal of each satellite. The difference between the time embedded in a satellite's radio signal and a time measured at the point of reception of the radio signal by a clock synchronized to the satellite clocks is a measure of the range of the satellite from the point of reception. Since the clocks in the system cannot be maintained in perfect synchronism, the measure of range is referred to as "pseudorange" because it includes both a satellite clock error and the clock error at the point of reception.
Each satellite transmits, in addition to its clock time, its position in an earth-fixed coordinate system and its own clock error. A user, by measuring the pseudoranges to four satellites and correcting the pseudoranges for the satellite clock errors, can first of all determine his actual range to each satellite and his own clock error. The user can then determine his own position in the earth-fixed coordinate system, knowing his range to each of the four satellites and the position of each satellite in the earth-fixed coordinate system.
GPS by itself is unsatisfactory as a sole means of navigation for civil aviation users. GPS has been designed to have extensive self-test features built into the system. However, a slowly increasing range bias error could occur due to satellite clock faults or due to errors in the uploaded data introduced as a result of human errors at the GPS Operational Control System Facility. Since such failures could affect users over a wide area, the Federal Aviation Authority requires that, even for approval as a supplemental navigation system, the system have "integrity" which is defined by the Federal Radio Navigation Plan (U.S. Dept. of Defense, DOD-4650.4 and U.S. Dept. of Transportation, DOT-TSC-RSPA-87-3 1986, DOT-TSC-RSPA-88-4 1988) as the ability to provide timely warnings to users when the system should not be used for navigation. For sole means of navigation, the system must also have sufficient redundancy that it can continue to function despite failure of a single component. For the non-precision approach phase of flight, a timely warning is 10 seconds. The present GPS integrity-monitoring system in the Operation Control System may take hours. A GPS "integrity channel" has been proposed to provide the integrity-monitoring function.
Because of the high cost of the GPS integrity channel, "receiver autonomous integrity monitoring" (RAIM) has been proposed wherein a receiver makes use of redundant satellite information to check the integrity of the navigation solution. It is sufficient to simply detect a satellite failure in the case of supplemental navigation. However, to detect a satellite failure using RAIM requires that at least five satellites with sufficiently good geometry be available.
For a sole means of navigation, it is also necessary to isolate the failed satellite and to be able to navigate with the remaining satellites. This requires that at least six satellites with sufficiently good geometry be available. To meet the integrity limit of 0.3 n.m. required for a non-precision approach, the availability of the five satellites, as required for supplemental navigation, is only 95 to 99 percent, depending on assumptions. However, the availability of the six satellites required for sole means is only 60 or 70 percent, which is totally inadequate.
If an inertial reference system (IRS) is also available, an attempt could be made to coast through integrity outage periods when the five satellites required for integrity are not available. Such periods sometimes last more than 10 minutes. An IRS which has not been calibrated in flight by GPS has a velocity accuracy specification of eight knots, 2 dRMS. It would therefore not be capable of meeting the accuracy requirement during such integrity outage periods. Moreover, for sole means of navigation it might also be necessary to coast through periods when six satellites were unavailable, in case a failure of one of these were detected. Since such periods can last more than an hour, the accuracy requirement cannot be achieved with an IRS uncalibrated by GPS.
The problem with calibrating the IRS with GPS using a conventional Kalman filter is that a GPS failure can contaminate the integrated GPS/IRS solution before the failure is detected. If the GPS failure causes a pseudorange error drift of less than one meter/sec., it cannot be detected by tests of the Kalman filter residuals.